READING & VIEWING

Reading and Viewing involves students understanding, interpreting, critically analysing, reflecting upon, and enjoying written and visual, print and non-print texts. It encompasses reading and viewing a wide range of texts and media, including literary texts. Reading involves active engagement with texts and the development of knowledge about the relationship between them and the contexts in which they are created. It also involves the development of knowledge about a range of strategies for reading. (VCAA, English Curriculum).

At Gembrook Primary School, reading is our first academic priority, as every students requires reading to be successful across the whole curriculum, particularly writing. Students are exposed to learning print concepts, phonemic awareness, decoding, word accuracy, word fluency, expression, word morphology, and comprehension.

Every student has an individualised reading goal, which is monitored and analysed by the student and class teacher in a conference. Comprehension strategies (activating prior knowledge, making connections, visualising, predicting, inferring, questioning, summarising, synthesising and critically thinking) are taught across every year level and students use their reader’s notebook to track their thinking and understanding of the books they read.

All students at Gembrook Primary School participate in a reading lesson which includes opportunity to independently read every day. Each daily reading lesson has an explicitly taught component using exemplar mentor texts, plenty of opportunity to practise their reading and apply their new learning, as well as debrief (share and reflect) with their peers and teacher. Students have opportunities to work independently, in small groups or as a whole class, with at least once a fortnight 1:1 conference with their teacher. There are a variety of reading practices a teacher will implement to provide the most appropriate format for the lesson; independent reading, shared reading, modelled reading, guided reading, literature circles (book club), and reading conferences.

Students read at different levels and this is why students are encouraged to read “just right” books, ensuring they are able to read accurately, read with fluency and are able to understand what they are reading. This is discussed at their weekly 1:1 conference with the teacher. We encourage students to record the nights of reading they complete, either on their own or with a parent/carer. We place value on celebrating reading achievements through weekly academic reading awards at assembly and we reward those students with certificates for reading regularly at home, with the high achieving reward being a 300 night pin.

WRITING

Learning to write is a complex process encompassing cognitive, physical, social and cultural dimensions. Writing, as a mode of English in the Victorian Curriculum, is an integral part of learning in all disciplines requiring students to write or compose a diverse range of texts that meet the literacy demands specific to the various curriculum or discipline areas. Texts produced, and interpreted, might be print based or multimodal. In the composition of modally complex texts, ‘writing is one of several modes of representations’. As such, students need to be taught a range of skills and meaning-making codes to compose texts (VCAA, English Curriculum).

At Gembrook Primary School, reading and writing are closely linked, working together in the study of a genre to demonstrate the connection between author (writer) and audience (reader). The writing process follows the writing cycle;

1. Planning and rehearsing: the generation, selection and sorting of ideas to write about, consideration of purpose and audience which will influence genre selection and organisation.
2. Drafting or composing: the recording of ideas with attention to meaning making, grammar, spelling, punctuation and handwriting (or keyboarding).
3. Revising: the revisiting of the text (often as a result of feedback from peers and/or the teacher) to improve and enhance the writing.
4. Editing and proofreading: the polishing of the draft in readiness for publication, which includes editing for spelling, text layout, grammar, capitalisation and punctuation. 
5. Publishing: the preparation of the text for sharing with an audience, with attention given to the form and style of the text.

With this writing process in mind, Gembrook Primary School then use the 6 + 1 Traits of Writing to ensure students understand the process of writing in a student friendly and explicit way.

The 6 + 1 Traits of Writing are;

1. Ideas
2. Organisation
3. Word Choice
4. Sentence Fluency
5. Voice
6. Conventions

+ 1 Presentation

Students need to write with purpose and have an authentic audience in mind. Explicit teaching is vital to support students going through the process with focussed and scaffolded writing experiences. It is important for students to collaborate (engage in peer conferences) at all phases of the writing process, provide and receive feedback, and be exposed to rich authentic mentor and modelled text.

At the conclusion of each unit of study, students will have created a writing piece to be proud of; a poetry anthology, a picture story book, or an informative presentation. We celebrate writing at Gembrook Primary School, both at the conclusion of a unit of study and a weekly academic writing award presented at our assembly to a student who has fulfilled the high expectations of writing at our school. Students also have the opportunity to share their writing at assembly or display it in our writing display window.